Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:59:08AM +, Simon Huggins wrote: On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 03:31:45AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: If you don't want to deal with the occasional spam that gets through, then feel free to unsubscribe. Furthemore, the thresholds for automatic unsubscription are set fairly high anyway; the warning messages we send out are for your information only, as they often indicate mail misconfigurations at your end (or rarely, at ours.) They don't contain much information and don't talk about thresholds Thank you for fixing these to actually have information in them now. 1 bounce out of 190 mails in 7 days (0%, kick-score is 80%) Might I suggest you only send them out above sasy 50% or 60% bounces? Thanks. Simon -- ... Don't worry, understanding of the topic being discussed has been optional for a long time on debian-de...@. -- Md -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
On Tuesday 27 January 2009, Simon Huggins wrote: They don't contain much information and don't talk about thresholds Thank you for fixing these to actually have information in them now. 1 bounce out of 190 mails in 7 days (0%, kick-score is 80%) Might I suggest you only send them out above sasy 50% or 60% bounces? I've actually been happy to receive them as it's shown up some braindead mail handling from my ISP which I otherwise might not have become aware of. Cheers, FJP signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Hello Don, Am 2008-12-27 03:31:45, schrieb Don Armstrong: If you don't want to deal with the occasional spam that gets through, then feel free to unsubscribe. Furthemore, the thresholds for automatic unsubscription are set fairly high anyway; the warning messages we send out are for your information only, as they often indicate mail misconfigurations at your end (or rarely, at ours.) Please, is it possibel to include threshold infos in the info messge from the listsoftware? And of course, how many message went bounced? I had to whitelist the sender of the bounces since my courier server mailsystem has tried to bounce (!!!) it... (my courier is my intranet box which get the messages form the Internet using fetchmail and I think that boincing is not realy what I want with some exceptions) Thanks, Greetings and nice Day/Evening Michelle Konzack Systemadministrator 24V Electronic Engineer Tamay Dogan Network Debian GNU/Linux Consultant -- Linux-User #280138 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org/ # Debian GNU/Linux Consultant # http://www.tamay-dogan.net/ http://www.can4linux.org/ Michelle Konzack Apt. 917 ICQ #328449886 +49/177/935194750, rue de Soultz MSN LinuxMichi +33/6/61925193 67100 Strasbourg/France IRC #Debian (irc.icq.com) signature.pgp Description: Digital signature
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Hello Jeroen, I am on 65 Debian Lists (or 147 in total) and from Debian I get per day less then 38 spams... and most are filtered by spamassassin and some simple procmail rules... Oh yes, the BTS (I am subscribed to any packages installed on my own systems and those of my customers, hence 1586 in total) is the hell, since some times I get over 700 per day. However I am on those lists: .ML_debian.68k .ML_debian.alpha .ML_debian.amd64 .ML_debian.arm .ML_debian.cd .ML_debian.changes .ML_debian.curiosa .ML_debian.custom .ML_debian.debootloaders-yaboot .ML_debian.debtags-devel .ML_debian.desktop .ML_debian.devel .ML_debian.devel-announce .ML_debian.devel-changes .ML_debian.doc .ML_debian.edu .ML_debian.embedded .ML_debian.events-eu .ML_debian.firewall .ML_debian.hppa .ML_debian.i18n .ML_debian.ia64 .ML_debian.initscripts-ng-devel .ML_debian.isp .ML_debian.jobs .ML_debian.jr .ML_debian.laptop .ML_debian.legal .ML_debian.libhid-discuss .ML_debian.live .ML_debian.mentors .ML_debian.mips .ML_debian.multimedia .ML_debian.newmaint .ML_debian.news .ML_debian.news-french .ML_debian.news-german .ML_debian.perl .ML_debian.pkg-mc-devel .ML_debian.pkg-postgresql-public .ML_debian.policy .ML_debian.powerpc .ML_debian.printing .ML_debian.project .ML_debian.qa .ML_debian.release .ML_debian.s390 .ML_debian.science .ML_debian.security .ML_debian.security-announce .ML_debian.sparc .ML_debian.ssh .ML_debian.testing .ML_debian.testing-changes .ML_debian.user .ML_debian.user-french .ML_debian.user-german .ML_debian.user-spanish .ML_debian.user-turkish .ML_debian.vote .ML_debian.webapps .ML_debian.women .ML_debian.www .ML_debian.x It seems that there are 4 alioth list missing plus some very low traffic lists where messages are already archived after 6 month... Thanks, Greetings and nice Day/Evening Michelle Konzack Systemadministrator 24V Electronic Engineer Tamay Dogan Network Debian GNU/Linux Consultant -- Linux-User #280138 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org/ # Debian GNU/Linux Consultant # http://www.tamay-dogan.net/ http://www.can4linux.org/ Michelle Konzack Apt. 917 ICQ #328449886 +49/177/935194750, rue de Soultz MSN LinuxMichi +33/6/61925193 67100 Strasbourg/France IRC #Debian (irc.icq.com) signature.pgp Description: Digital signature
Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
[maybe the Listmaster of the day is able to read when other people get involved in this] Cord Beermann wrote: Hallo! Du (Jeroen Massar) hast geschrieben: (http://lists.debian.org/bounces/iLpJvMjXJJDuaeJK2W6wdA) Stop forwarding spam already! I've mentioned this before. There is a VERY simple solution to this problem btw: make the list subscriber-post-only, as the subscriber base is small (and the real traffic too) it will be hard for the spammers to guess a correct source address. We are aware that Debian-Mailinglists aren't 100% spam-free, but if you can't accept that, don't subscribe to our lists. The spam-check is not even needed if you would simply close it, as I wrote. READING is *VERY* difficult it seems, lets try it differently: = Those senders are *NOT* subscribed to the lists == = Most Debian lists are OPEN lists== From http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/: This list is not moderated; posting is allowed by anyone. From: http://lists.debian.org/debian-ipv6/ This list is not moderated; posting is allowed by anyone. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/ This list is not moderated; posting is allowed by anyone. and basically every other list And as those lists addresses are very easily harvested from anywhere spammers just LOVE them and you even nicely forward them to a lot of other people and even the archives. If you would change that little thing (making the lists post-by-subscribers only) then that spam would not get forwarded by the list because the spammers are not signed up in the first place (okay, the spammer could get smart, guess a correct source etc, but then only PGP/DKIM/SPF or whatever could save your day) Thus if you would simply turn on subscription-only mode all is solved and that would make a lot of people AND the list archives VERY happy. See for all your spam your own bloody archives, just a little selection doing simple scan on subject: http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/12/msg00029.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/11/msg00100.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/11/msg00105.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/10/msg8.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/10/msg00045.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/09/msg00010.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2008/09/msg00040.html and just in case, other lists get it too: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/12/msg00121.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/12/msg00143.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/12/msg00138.html You claim the mailbox does 50k mails per day, and 2500 spams make it through the filters (cool that you know that btw, if you know it is spam, why don't you filter them?) Now, multiply that 2500 times the number of subscribers, and tada you can calculate how many spam you are sending, I bet it is more than the original 50k. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/ also contains some hints how you can help us to improve the ham/Spam-ratio, you can also simply bounce (As in mutt) spams you get through our lists to: report-lists...@lists.debian.org Yes, because I really have time to do spam reports and doing it manually is really such a great idea and will nicely take a lot of time from everybody. I rather do useful stuff thank you. And having to sign up every once in a while to a Debian list is really annoying because you get kicked off because you are forwarding spam. Just turn on the subscribe-only bit already, that makes it easy for EVERYONE and solves all these crappy issues you are having. And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. Greets, Jeroen signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Jeroen Massar wrote: [maybe the Listmaster of the day is able to read when other people get involved in this] The listmasters are responsible for the lists. Sending mail to -project isn't particularly useful, as it's not on topic there. [For those on -project; this reply is going there just to see that someone has replied; I personally won't respond further, save via listmas...@.] Cord Beermann wrote: Hallo! Du (Jeroen Massar) hast geschrieben: (http://lists.debian.org/bounces/iLpJvMjXJJDuaeJK2W6wdA) Stop forwarding spam already! I've mentioned this before. There is a VERY simple solution to this problem btw: make the list subscriber-post-only, as the subscriber base is small (and the real traffic too) it will be hard for the spammers to guess a correct source address. We are aware that Debian-Mailinglists aren't 100% spam-free, but if you can't accept that, don't subscribe to our lists. The spam-check is not even needed if you would simply close it, as I wrote. We aren't going to close the lists that are currently open in the forseeable future. If this is a problem for you, feel free to unsubscribe. If you would change that little thing (making the lists post-by-subscribers only) then that spam would not get forwarded by the list because the spammers are not signed up in the first place Spammers have already signed up to our lists on multiple occasions. (okay, the spammer could get smart, guess a correct source etc, but then only PGP/DKIM/SPF or whatever could save your day) We already check these when appropriate, and use them to score mail. You claim the mailbox does 50k mails per day, and 2500 spams make it through the filters (cool that you know that btw, if you know it is spam, why don't you filter them?) Because we don't know that it's spam at the time we send them out, obviously. [And yes, this means that we're sending somewhere around 5% spam; we discard well over 99% of it, though, and we're constantly improving our setup to discard more and more of it.] And having to sign up every once in a while to a Debian list is really annoying because you get kicked off because you are forwarding spam. If you don't want to deal with the occasional spam that gets through, then feel free to unsubscribe. Furthemore, the thresholds for automatic unsubscription are set fairly high anyway; the warning messages we send out are for your information only, as they often indicate mail misconfigurations at your end (or rarely, at ours.) Just turn on the subscribe-only bit already, that makes it easy for EVERYONE and solves all these crappy issues you are having. It doesn't solve the issues, it doesn't make it easier for everyone, nor is it a solution that we're going to employ on the lists that are currently open in the foreseeable future. And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. If you sign up for mail from mailing lists, just discard mail that you don't want to read that comes in from us with Priority: bulk or List-* headers instead of bouncing it. A mailing list is little more than a glorified mail forwarder: bouncing forwarded mail is wrong. Don Armstrong -- [T]he question of whether Machines Can Think, [...] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra The threats to computing science http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Hallo! Du (Jeroen Massar) hast geschrieben: [ JUst two corrections ] You claim the mailbox does 50k mails per day, and 2500 spams make it through the filters (cool that you know that btw, if you know it is spam, why don't you filter them?) Now, multiply that 2500 times the number of subscribers, and tada you can calculate how many spam you are sending, I bet it is more than the original 50k. the 2500 mails/day that pass our filters contain about 1-2% spam (that can be a higher percentage on low-traffic lists) And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. according to RfC2822 Chapter 3.3 blocking because of Content is discouraged. Yours, Cord, Debian Listmaster of the day -- http://lists.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
* Don Armstrong: We are aware that Debian-Mailinglists aren't 100% spam-free, but if you can't accept that, don't subscribe to our lists. The spam-check is not even needed if you would simply close it, as I wrote. We aren't going to close the lists that are currently open in the forseeable future. Thanks! I hope you aren't forced to change this default configuration anytime soon. Being able to post to our mailing lists without jumping through hoops, no matter who you are, is something I value, but I understand that there is lots of work involved making this possible, given the amount of spam that hits the lists. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Jeroen Massar jer...@unfix.org writes: Cord Beermann wrote: We are aware that Debian-Mailinglists aren't 100% spam-free, but if you can't accept that, don't subscribe to our lists. The spam-check is not even needed if you would simply close it, as I wrote. Incorrect. Spambots are quite capable of subscribing to a list in order to spam it. So, making a list subscriber-only does *not* obviate the need for spam filtering. = Most Debian lists are OPEN lists== This is a benefit not to be given up lightly. Those who want to close a list to non-subscribers have to make the argument for that, and as I point out above, “it prevents spam” is false and not a strong argument. -- \ “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is | `\ able to think things out for himself, without regard to the | _o__) prevailing superstitions and taboos.” —Henry L. Mencken | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 03:31:45AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Jeroen Massar wrote: And having to sign up every once in a while to a Debian list is really annoying because you get kicked off because you are forwarding spam. If you don't want to deal with the occasional spam that gets through, then feel free to unsubscribe. Furthemore, the thresholds for automatic unsubscription are set fairly high anyway; the warning messages we send out are for your information only, as they often indicate mail misconfigurations at your end (or rarely, at ours.) They don't contain much information and don't talk about thresholds though I haven't seen any for a while having successfully taught dspam about them. And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. If you sign up for mail from mailing lists, just discard mail that you don't want to read that comes in from us with Priority: bulk or List-* headers instead of bouncing it. A mailing list is little more than a glorified mail forwarder: bouncing forwarded mail is wrong. This is the part I don't really understand. You're in an amazing position. You have thousands of people who have potentially better spam filtering systems than you do bouncing mail they think is spam at you. If you count per message-ID who bounces which mails you could improve your filters based on some threshold of how many people bounced that mail. Especially given you do process bounces automatically via your script that cause the original post. Instead, masochistically you send out contentless pings that your subscribers dislike. I don't get it. -- _hug...@earth.li -+*+- fou, con et anglais _ (_) ACT NORMAL! ACT NORMAL!! - Homer (_) (_) (_) \______/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
This one time, at band camp, Cord Beermann said: Hallo! Du (Jeroen Massar) hast geschrieben: And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. according to RfC2822 Chapter 3.3 blocking because of Content is discouraged. begin pedantry RFC2822, section 3.3, is about date/time formats. I suspect you mean RFC2821, section 3.3, which does not quite say that. It says: the DATA command should fail only [...] or if the server determines that the message should be rejected for policy or other reasons. It goes on to say: Server SMTP systems SHOULD NOT reject messages based on perceived defects in the RFC 822 or MIME [12] message header or message body. So, while we are discouraged from rejecting based on poorly formatted MIME, MTA admins are by no means discouraged from rejecting mail at DATA time in general for site policy reasons. /pedantry I know this is a semi-religious topic with lots of arguments on each side, so I'll stop here before I make any comments on the relative merits of either opinion. I just wanted to point out that the actual text doesn't quite say that. -- - | ,''`.Stephen Gran | | : :' :sg...@debian.org | | `. `'Debian user, admin, and developer | |`- http://www.debian.org | - signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Don Armstrong d...@debian.org writes: On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Jeroen Massar wrote: And yes, my SMTP server and those of a lot of other people will CORRECTLY refuse to accept mail classified as spam and correctly give a 500 SMTP error code as the server will refuse to deliver it. If you sign up for mail from mailing lists, just discard mail that you don't want to read that comes in from us with Priority: bulk or List-* headers instead of bouncing it. A mailing list is little more than a glorified mail forwarder: bouncing forwarded mail is wrong. I don't control my mail server, so I can't make it do that. -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 03:21:46PM +, Stephen Gran wrote: begin pedantry RFC2822, section 3.3, is about date/time formats. I suspect you mean RFC2821, section 3.3, which does not quite say that. It says: the DATA command should fail only [...] or if the server determines that the message should be rejected for policy or other reasons. It goes on to say: Server SMTP systems SHOULD NOT reject messages based on perceived defects in the RFC 822 or MIME [12] message header or message body. So, while we are discouraged from rejecting based on poorly formatted MIME, MTA admins are by no means discouraged from rejecting mail at DATA time in general for site policy reasons. /pedantry pedantry grade=worse useful=not very It would be good if people stopped reading obsolete documents :) The current SMTP RFC is 5321 (which is a draft standard). Of course, that particular passage has not changed much: [...] the DATA command should fail only [...] if the server determines that the message should be rejected for policy or other reasons. [...] Server SMTP systems SHOULD NOT reject messages based on perceived defects in the RFC 822 or MIME (RFC 2045 [21]) message header section or message body. I find the example that follows the passage (even in 2822) illuminating: In particular, they MUST NOT reject messages in which the numbers of Resent-header fields do not match or Resent-to appears without Resent-from and/or Resent-date. Basically, what it's saying is that RFC pedantry is not a valid rejection reason. I agree with Stephen's conclusion. /pedantry -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/antti-juhani/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Ben Pfaff b...@cs.stanford.edu writes: Don Armstrong d...@debian.org writes: If you sign up for mail from mailing lists, just discard mail that you don't want to read that comes in from us with Priority: bulk or List-* headers instead of bouncing it. A mailing list is little more than a glorified mail forwarder: bouncing forwarded mail is wrong. I don't control my mail server, so I can't make it do that. For whatever it's worth, Stanford's main campus servers never bounce spam for basically this reason. We either silently discard it if it's extremely high-probability spam or we deliver it tagged and let the recipient filter it or not as they choose. Bouncing spam is a reliable way to mailbomb some innocent person, and as someone who's been mailbombed by such things repeatedly, I don't like the experience. This is true even when you do it properly at the SMTP level, since there are numerous ways in which spam gets forwarded, particularly in a university context where there are a lot of departmental mail servers and a lot of forwarding back and forth to one's server of choice. None of the attempted reworks of the SMTP protocol to address this have really caught on. I can't speak for CS, however; I'm not sure what they do. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Spamming the World through Open Debian Mailinglists (Re: lists.debian.org has received bounces from you)
Russ Allbery r...@debian.org writes: Ben Pfaff b...@cs.stanford.edu writes: Don Armstrong d...@debian.org writes: If you sign up for mail from mailing lists, just discard mail that you don't want to read that comes in from us with Priority: bulk or List-* headers instead of bouncing it. A mailing list is little more than a glorified mail forwarder: bouncing forwarded mail is wrong. I don't control my mail server, so I can't make it do that. For whatever it's worth, Stanford's main campus servers never bounce spam for basically this reason. We either silently discard it if it's extremely high-probability spam or we deliver it tagged and let the recipient filter it or not as they choose. For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to say anything about the main Stanford or Stanford CS department mail servers. Even though I use @cs.stanford.edu as my primary email address, my mail gets forwarded off campus to a completely different site thousands of miles away. -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
